


Getting Things Done

by metisket



Category: D.Gray-man, Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Crossover, Fighting the Good Fight, Gen, Ishbal | Ishval, and allen will not teach it to you, ed won't have it, it's a good show and hawkeye means to enjoy it, it's a trick, the children's brigade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:06:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metisket/pseuds/metisket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allen Walker has an agenda. Roy Mustang has an agenda. Ed’s starting to wish he’d never so much as heard the word ‘agenda.’</p>
<p><i>“You </i>can’t be here<i>,” Edward snarls, pointing accusingly.</i><br/><i>Allen forces himself to stop looking horrified; he pulls the act around himself like a shield, and smiles gamely. “But here I am. Hello, Ed. It’s been a while.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Getting Things Done

**Author's Note:**

> First posted March 2011.

When he was fifteen, he got a job playing piano at a nightclub in Creta. It was a good job, and he was managing to look the part: more forgettable, less dangerous, and slightly older than usual. Black hair, no glaring scars. He’d learned a lot about makeup from watching Anita, and it was actually turning out useful.

People crowded around him when he was done for the night, asking his name, where he was from, how he’d learned to play. Dozens of people: giggling young women, confident older women, and smiling old women who claimed to think he was a nice boy. Young men, acting half as if they were looking for a fight, older men, either as confident as the women, or nervous and shamed, depending. And finally, the old men, who didn’t know what he was up to, but knew he was up to something, and found it hilarious.

_The Musician_ , he told them all. _Call me the Musician_. They laughed and didn’t ask any more. Creta has hostile neighbors on all sides, and doesn’t trust its more distant allies. Secrets are bread and butter for half the country; people tend to be keenly sensitive to dangerous information.

In retrospect, the Musician blames the makeup. The makeup worked so well that he thought, well, why not use a few more of Anita’s tricks?

Mistake.

He really has no choice but to blame the makeup, because otherwise he’s left staring at the horrible possibility that he’s turning into Cross.

The owner of the club was a middle-aged man who looked at his piano player with the same nervous, shamed (wanting) eyes as a number of the customers. That wasn’t why the Musician singled him out. No, it was actually his former profession that made him special.

The owner had had the unfortunate name of Skin Boric until he emigrated and changed it, and under that name, he’d been an Amestrian Army officer. A lieutenant. The stories of what he’d done during the war in Ishbal were infamous, nightmarish. Skin Boric: a name to curse by.

The Musician had never met a war criminal outside of a war zone before. He’d expected something more sinister, more what he remembered from home. It didn’t turn out the way he’d expected. Things rarely did.

It was easy, easy to lure the owner in, easy to make him trust. The Musician, like Cross, has a gift for that kind of thing. Making Skin Boric love him was simple.

It was much more complicated to leave afterward with most of his money, knowing he was already in debt, knowing he could well be killed for want of money.

There weren’t meant to be complications; Skin was meant to be a monster. But on closer inspection, he turned out to be weak and afraid, bitter and sorry, given to fits of rage, but capable of surprising kindness. He turned out to be human.

The Musician left anyway because he needed that money, because he owed that money. Because he’d promised. He left because he didn’t have the right to do anything else.

He’ll never seduce anyone again. Maybe it works for Anita, but for him, it’s going too far; it’s too close and too unfair. He doesn’t know why he never recognizes a line until after he’s crossed it. He blames the makeup, he blames Anita, he blames himself. But most of all, he blames Cross. It’s practically reflex by now, anyway.

He made himself sick with worry on the train ride home. Sick with worry over an Amestrian Army lieutenant undeniably guilty of brutality, rape, genocide. It was ridiculous. How many times had he told himself not to get attached to a mark? But he always did, though he never admitted it to anyone.

Not that he needed to.

_Shit_ , Lavi said the instant they met. _You look like you’ve been dragged backwards through Hell. Again. Seriously, you’ve had enough, kiddo. You’re good at this, but you’re not cut out for it. We can probably get by with the money you’ve already made_.

This was a lie and they both knew it. _One more run_ , the Musician insisted.

Lavi frowned, but he shrugged and said, _Make it count, then_.

* * *

“Lieutenant Hawkeye.”

“Good morning, sir.”

It’s 9 o’clock Monday morning, the Colonel has hardly made it though the door, and already I’m having a crisis of duty and conscience. This sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed to happen before noon.

On the left side of my desk is the annual budget. The Colonel hates the budget. He hates it with a single-minded dedication that’s almost like love.

On the right side of my desk are the personnel files for a number of soldiers due for promotion. The Colonel loves evaluating people for promotion, loves studying their habits and quirks and skills, loves winnowing out the truth from the evasions in their commanding officers’ reports.

I was saving the budget for a day when he’d annoyed me. Unfortunately—and uncharacteristically—he hasn’t annoyed me for weeks. This means the budget is getting quite urgent.

The Colonel is incapable of taking anything at face value. If I give him the budget, he’ll assume I’m punishing him for something, and will waste valuable time wondering what he’s done. And I refuse to explain. I refuse. That’s just catering to his paranoia.

If I give him the personnel files, the budget won’t get done. The budget _needs_ to be done.

“Here you go, Lieutenant Hawkeye.”

A gloved hand carefully sets a mug of tea on my desk. I take a sip. Earl Grey, one spoonful of sugar. Exactly the way I like it.

This is starting to become disturbing.

“Thank you, Private Walker. That’s…thoughtful of you.”

He smiles brightly, appallingly cute. Which makes no sense. Teenagers with white hair and huge facial scars should in no way be able to manage _cute_. “You seemed a little tired,” he murmurs, then whisks back to his desk and bends his head to his work before he can start to annoy me. This is quite a trick, as people hovering over my desk generally annoy me instantly.

It makes a certain amount of troubling sense, though, with our Private Walker. It’s the reason we accepted him, even though he’s a raw new recruit. Even though he’s our second adolescent soldier, and people are now calling our office the Children’s Brigade.

The thing about Private Allen Walker is…well, to begin with, he wasn’t born with that name. In fact, it’s quite new to him. On top of that, he’s sixteen years old and this is, as far as we can tell, his fifth career.

As far as we, Maes Hughes, Madame Christmas, and the entire Armstrong family network can tell, that is to say. We took a serious interest in him once he specifically requested our office, but dear Allen hasn’t made the research easy for us. He hasn’t made it easy for anyone: as of the latest information, he’s wanted in four countries.

And so young. One really must admire his efficiency.

* * *

When he was fourteen, he worked in a bar in Drachma. He flaunted the scar there because it was a border town, and everyone flaunted their scars. They were badges of honor. _I’m still alive_ , the scars said. _You should see the other guy_ , they said.

He waited tables during the day and dealt cards at night. In that part of Drachma, the popular game was called Ice, in which, among other things, a player lost if he had a hand totaling fourteen.

He was pleased that it matched his age, and called himself the Fourteenth. That really should have been warning enough.

He’d come to town in pursuit of a certain former major in the Amestrian Army, generally known by the name Tyki Mikk. The major was quite the card player, which made things almost too easy.

Tyki Mikk was likable. The Fourteenth knew better, by then, than to find that surprising. A lot of soldiers were likable outside of a battlefield; war did strange things to people. Look what it had done to him. War did strange things to people, but that was no excuse.

He taught the major a few tricks, a little sleight of hand, a sign language of their own. When he took well to those, the Fourteenth taught him more tricks. Dealer-player scams that were tough to pick up on, and even tougher to prove. The two of them made a nice little sum. A small fortune, one might say, even split 50/50.

If the Fourteenth had been serious about not getting caught, he would have moved them on after a week, or even a few days. Instead, they stayed for a month, working that same bar, that same back room. The major must have been a fundamentally honest man, or he would never have fallen for that.

But then, the major had trusted him.

The Fourteenth could sense a crowd turning ugly as easily as he could hear that a piano was out of tune. The instant things went too far, he left, taking his fifty percent with him.

The major, he understands, was not so lucky. He’s sorry about that, a little.

* * *

There’s a laundry list of crimes Allen (or his alias _du jour_ ) probably had a hand in: confidence games, fraud, human trafficking. In Creta and Drachma, the police are sure he’s guilty of something. In Aerugo, he’s considered a runaway. It’s not clear why Xing wants him, but oh, they do.

Somehow, though, no one has managed to catch him, and Amestris’s extradition policy is little better than a polite fiction. Thus far, Allen has gotten away with it. He’s always walked off, usually with a great deal of money, leaving some unfortunate soldier to take the fall. Some unfortunate soldier who _fought in Ishbal_.

It’s all very professional.

Allen doesn’t give the impression of a person accustomed to the finer things in life, so whatever he’s doing with that money, he’s not keeping much of it for himself. The money trail seems to disappear into the eastern desert. According to rumor, it disappears into the hands of a redheaded boy with an eyepatch, whose name, nationality, and allegiance no one has been able to discover. There are no leads on where it goes after that. Just guesses.

The most popular guess—posited by Kain Fuery and endorsed by all the romantics, including the Colonel—is a luxurious Ishbalan refugee camp in the middle of the desert somewhere. I can’t decide whether I believe in that or not. It makes a pretty picture, I suppose.

There is some evidence for the guess. The fact that Allen only targets those of us who fought in Ishbal, for instance. Then, too, there’s his upbringing. Madame Christmas has discovered that, before he traveled across the desert to Xing, Allen lived in Ishbal. At the time, he had light brown hair and no scars. And he had an adoptive father: a well-known, eccentric, Ishbalan acrobat and juggler named Mana Walker. No one seems to know the name Allen went by then; Mana always called him _son_.

Mana is dead. No one is sure how it happened, but one can, perhaps, guess.

And now Allen has come to us.

If it had been up to me, we would have arrested him on sight and worked out the details later. But the Colonel claims to be _concerned_.

The Colonel is a soft touch with children. If this is what ultimately gets him killed, I will never forgive him.

“What does he want from us?” the Colonel asked when Allen signed up and requested our office.

I shudder to think. Allen, or whatever his name is, has made a fortune and given it away, which requires both enormous talent and terrifying drive. And he’s done it by trampling over a very specific set of victims. Was that out of a sense of justice? Irony? Something more fundamentally disturbing?

What _does_ he want from us? You can’t get blood from a stone, and our bank accounts are uniformly depressing. So what does a con artist want from impoverished soldiers guilty of genocide in his home country?

Not a comfortable question.

It’s hard to keep my concerns in mind, though, drinking my perfect tea, looking at Allen’s sweet, earnest face as he works. He has incredible charisma, as one might expect. Every bit as bad as the Colonel.

“We may be on the same side,” the Colonel had insisted. “We should at least try to win him over.”

I find the burn-scarred arm troubling. Oh, there were a lot of fires during the war. There were explosions. The Flame Alchemist didn’t cause every burn in Ishbal, not by a long shot.

But Allen Walker used his adoptive father’s last name to sign up for the Amestrian Army, and he requested _our office_. After making his way through the ex-pats, we were the first Amestrians he chose.

The Colonel claims we won’t know until we ask. For an intelligent man, he can be such a fool.

* * *

When he was thirteen, Cross dumped him at Anita’s place in Aerugo without so much as a fare thee well. Typical Cross.

To his amazement, though, Anita turned out to be a really great person. Cross had been her commanding officer during Ishbal, which must have been a hellish experience, but she didn’t seem to hold a grudge. And she was trying so hard to make up for what she’d done there. She was giving her life away to make up for it, the same as Cross.

She asked what his name was, and he told her Neah. That was what Mana used to call him on days when he couldn’t keep his son and his dead brother straight in his head, which happened kind of a lot. So the name was comforting, in a way. Neah.

It was creepy, too, but. He dealt with it. He’d chosen it; he had no one to blame but himself.

Anita ran a brothel. Nice place, as far as Neah could tell—not that he had much experience. But it was beautiful, it was expensive, and the women working there didn’t seem to totally hate everything.

The brothel was the money-maker, but Anita also ran a sort of underground railroad out of Ishbal and into Aerugo. Some of her employees were great at forging official documentation, and there were a bunch of overnight citizens of Aerugo who’d actually grown up in Ishbal. A few of them even remembered Mana.

A few of them were kids. Orphans. Anita pushed them all together a lot, and they came to be friends. There was Lenalee, with the suspicious scars on her wrists, Kanda, with a huge brand on his chest, Lavi, with only one eye, and Neah, of course. White hair, a scar all the way down his face, and a left arm burned to ruin. They fit together, the four of them. They understood each other.

That was when the whole…plan…got set up in the first place. It was Lavi’s idea. The spectacularly crazy ideas usually were.

_We’ll make our own country_ , he said, fifteen years old and already plotting world domination. Kanda rolled his eyes, Neah sighed, and Lenalee laughed. _I’m serious!_ Lavi insisted. _If an Amestrian hottie can make Ishbalans into Aerugans, then anybody can do anything, right? We’ll live in the middle of the desert, no one’ll find us!_

_There’s a reason people don’t live in the middle of the desert,_ Kanda pointed out. _Because they_ can’t _. It’s hot, you can’t grow anything, there’s no water—_

_My brother_ , Lenalee said proudly, _could build us a water pipeline and a whole underground secret base, I bet._

_Fucking ridiculous_ , Kanda said, but Neah noticed that he didn’t leave, which meant he didn’t _really_ think it was ridiculous.

_But_ , Neah said cautiously, _we’d need a lot of money_. He knew all about being short of money.

Everyone turned to look expectantly at him, as if he could conjure up money by magic. He’d told them about Cross and Cross’s debts and the absolutely ridiculous previous two years of his life. Apparently that made him the expert, in their eyes.

Still, the idea of making their own country had been a joke. None of them really believed in it, not even Lavi. It had been a joke.

Then Anita found out that her place was about to be raided, and they had to pack everything up overnight and pick a direction to run. Anita couldn’t stay in Aerugo, and neither could anyone who was known to have worked for her.

Lenalee said, _I think my brother could_ …

Lavi said, _Gramps knows all about desert survival anyway_ …

It wasn’t a joke anymore.

* * *

Havoc sighs loudly, tips his chair back precariously, and scrubs at his face. He hates paperwork; he isn’t designed for it. Give him a chase any day. Give him a physical task. Paperwork is a cruel necessity, and it’s painful to watch him doing it. Like watching a tiger pacing back and forth in a cage, trapped and confused.

Allen leans sideways, steals half of the tallest stack on Havoc’s desk, and drags it onto his own. He distributes the files evenly, so the paperwork theft isn’t immediately obvious.

Havoc opens his eyes, thumps all four chair legs back down to the floor, rolls his shoulders, and confronts his desk again. And frowns. He glances at Breda, who raises an eyebrow as if to say, _Yeah right_.

Havoc turns to Allen on the other side. Allen, who is working industriously, seemingly oblivious.

Havoc peers at Allen’s desk; recognizes one of the files there. He smiles, turns back to Breda, and holds out a hand. Breda sighs and pulls a box of cookies out of his drawer, passes them to Havoc. Who won a bet last week, come to think of it. Does this mean they’re reduced to wagering cookies? That’s a new low.

In any case, Havoc drops the cookies on Allen’s desk and returns to work without comment. Allen opens the box and snags a cookie from it, also without comment. Band of brothers.

Allen is very, very good at what he does.

The Colonel, I notice, is sitting with his chin propped on his hand, watching this little masterpiece of manipulation. For all his alleged concern, it seems more accurate to describe him as…fascinated. He looks like he’s thinking about taking notes.

He may just be getting the budget today, after all.

* * *

When he was twelve, he lived in Xing with Cross. Cross, who took him away from Ishbal. Cross, who found him crying over Mana’s grave. General Cross Marian, of the Amestrian Army.

Was he retired or just AWOL? He wasn’t forthcoming with details like that. In fact, he was a drunken, whoring, dangerous lunatic with a habit of foisting all of his considerable debt onto the nearest sucker, who was usually his apprentice, in the event.

That was what he called the boy he’d stolen from a graveyard. His apprentice. Apprentice in _what_ was never clear, although it was true that Cross taught him a lot. Mostly the kinds of things a person could be arrested for knowing.

Cross taught him pickpocketing, lockpicking, and the fine art of cheating at cards, but he also, for no discernable reason, spent hours—months—teaching him piano. Cross beat the crap out of him on a regular basis and called it training, but held him, patiently and silently, when he cried for Mana, for Ishbal, for everything he’d lost.

The man made no sense at all.

He was delighted with the idea that his apprentice could juggle, and forced him into a circus troupe (he had a distressing familiarity with the contortionists; the boy did not even want to know). The circus performers cooed over the boy’s hair and his scar. They put him in a cape and an elaborate mask, and they called him the Crowned Clown.

He loved the circus. It was like Mana’s roadside show made big and glamorous; it was weird and dangerous, tacky and shameless. It was perfect.

Cross loved it too, which was another thing in his favor.

Cross was up to something in Xing, that much was obvious. He was always talking to people, rich and poor, old and young. He talked a lot to a man in black who wore a mask. It made his apprentice nervous, though not as nervous as the ever-mounting debts.

He talked to a lot of people, and among them he must have talked to someone he shouldn’t have, because after about a year, he woke his apprentice up in the dead of night and dragged him clean out of the country.

The boy, maybe a little too used to Cross by this time, failed to find the experience anything but annoying.

* * *

The budget may turn out to be the least of the Colonel’s troubles today, because I can hear the loudest walk in East approaching. Oh, Edward. He may actually be stunting his growth by slamming his feet down that hard.

There’s no accompanying clanking; no Alphonse today. So Edward will be in a mood. If he’s alone, then it was decided that Alphonse couldn’t be spared from research, which means that Edward will be _missing_ his research. He’ll resent us for wasting his time.

This should be entertaining.

I move my teacup away from the edge of the desk, in case he destroys something and causes the room to shake.

Edward slams the door open, and everyone looks up with a smile. Everyone except Allen, that is, who looks up with wide, horrified eyes.

Yes, Edward is a lot to take on first meeting, but…horrified?

“Hey, Boss! How’s Al?”

“Hey. Al’s good. I’m busy as hell, though.”

“Fullmetal, you’re late with your report.”

“Shut up, Colonel, you’re a— _holy shit_.” He’s spotted Allen, and now they both look horrified. So Edward knows the infamous con artist, alias Allen Walker.

Of course he does.

“You _can’t be here_ ,” Edward snarls, pointing accusingly.

Allen forces himself to stop looking horrified; he pulls the act around himself like a shield, and smiles gamely. “But here I am. Hello, Ed. It’s been a while.”

“Oh, no you fucking don’t. Stop that shit right now, we had a deal, you _asshole_.”

“I didn’t…realize—”

“Okay. Okay, fine.” Ed takes a moment to breathe. He seems—outraged and afraid and on the brink of violence. He looks as if someone has threatened _Alphonse_. I don’t understand, and neither does the Colonel, who’s giving me a baffled glance. “That’s fair. But now you know. So you’re on your way out, right?”

“But—”

“ _But fucking nothing_.”

Allen stands slowly, carefully placing both hands flat on his desk and leaning over it. Unyielding. For the first time, he looks like a person who could befriend a man and then rob him blind. “I promised.”

“Promised a dead man. Promised me. Promised _Al_. That’s two to one.”

“Those promises are weighted differently.”

“Yeah, cuz when you come right down to it, the dead don’t count.”

Allen is starting to look a little insane. Edward’s expression, meanwhile, clearly says, _Bring it!_ The office is dead silent, save for the sound of Breda writing frantically. If I later find that he was calculating odds, I will be deeply unhappy with him.

“My dead,” Allen hisses in a low, unbalanced tone, “ _count_.”

“But promises to them don’t. I didn’t promise my mom because it’s too late for that. I promised myself. I promised Al. I promised because it’ll actually make a difference. And you’re standing in my way for the sake of a corpse.”

“For the sake of a corpse _and an entire_ —”

“Fullmetal,” the Colonel cuts in before Allen gives himself away and this actually erupts into violence. “Stop harassing my subordinate.”

Edward whirls on the Colonel with all the outrage that comment deserves. “ _Fuck_ you, I should just _let you die!_ ”

…Die? Is Edward exaggerating, or is there a lot that never made it into our reports?

“Die?” Allen repeats incredulously.

“Go broke,” Edward says, waving an impatient hand. “Get jailed. Have their lives ruined. _Call it whatever_.”

Oh good. Exaggerating, then. Things could have become very unpleasant, otherwise.

Allen, pulling himself together again by heroic force of will, turns to face the Colonel and bows deeply and sincerely in a way that Edward would never dream of. Of course, Edward would make a terrible con artist. “Colonel Mustang,” Allen says, “I’m sorry to ask this, but…could I take the rest of the day off? I’ll work overtime to make up for it, of course.”

The Colonel considers this, fingers steepled in front of his mouth. “All right,” he murmurs. “Dismissed.”

Allen salutes, careful to include all of us, and leaves. Edward storms out after him like an avenging angel. Permission? What’s that?

All of us turn to the Colonel, who still has his fingers steepled and his eyes closed, and we wait. After the footsteps in the hall fade away, he opens his eyes and says, “Havoc. Follow them.”

“You got it, Chief.” Havoc swings gleefully out of his chair, grabs his coat, and eases out the door in one smooth movement. His unspoken, _Yay! I get to go outside!_ lingers in the air for a moment.

“Um,” says Fuery. “Is Ed gonna be…okay?”

“Is _Allen_ gonna be okay, you mean,” Breda snickers. “He broke a promise to Al? His ass is _grass_.”

“I wish we knew what his name really is,” Falman says fretfully. “What’s the name Edward knows? We didn’t even ask!”

“You can ask later,” I soothe. Every time I start worrying about my own somewhat compulsive need for order, I only have to look at poor Falman, and I immediately feel better. “Edward’s not going anywhere.” After all, he’s researching.

“Sometimes it seems that Fullmetal knows everyone,” the Colonel murmurs, staring reproachfully at the door. “Absolutely everyone. Why is that?”

“If you think of him as a magnet to which all the trouble in the world is drawn,” I tell him, “it makes more sense.”

In any case, that isn’t what’s bothering me.

Why was Edward so upset? _So_ upset. I’ve never seen him this upset over anything less than a threat to Alphonse. Except for that incident with the girl chimera, I suppose, but that was a special case; Edward felt responsible, there.

_I should just let you die!_

Was Edward upset over…us? It seems unlikely, but then he’s not the most, ah. Tender person in the world. Maybe the fact that he talks to us at all is significant. Are we honestly important to Edward Elric, the human wrecking ball?

And if so, did he and Alphonse make Allen promise not to target anyone they love?

I turn to the Colonel, and I can tell from his half-shocked, half-touched expression that he’s come to the same conclusion. Then a few of the other implications catch up with him, and his face falls.

“Lieutenant,” he says, despairing. “Did a teenager in shining armor just walk in here and rescue us from another teenager?”

I really can’t give him any awful paperwork today. It would be too cruel. “I’m afraid so, sir.”

“He didn’t even give me his report.”

“I’m sorry, sir. Here. Let work take your mind off your troubles.” I toss the personnel files on his desk.

He sighs, but I can see that he’s…smiling. _Smiling_. So he’s found the humor in today’s disaster, has he?

I snatch the personnel files away from him and go to get the budget.

* * *

When Allen was sixteen, he watched Edward and Alphonse Elric tear apart a dusty, tense town called Liore. It was…unsubtle.

_I’m so, so sorry_ , said the giant suit of armor who was holding up a roof so it wouldn’t collapse onto Allen. _My brother just gets a little…out of control…sometimes, and, well_ …

The suit of armor was named Alphonse, and he had a brother named Edward. A brother named Major Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist, to be precise. Major Elric was too young to have had anything to do with Ishbal, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be useful.

(And Lavi’s voice said, _Make it count_.)

Allen took the time and effort to get to know the Elric brothers. He wouldn’t have if he’d realized how dangerous that could be.

Their conversation tactics were exactly the same as their fighting tactics. Ed ran right at you and blew things up in your face, while Al watched carefully, gauging your strengths and weaknesses. Waiting for the perfect moment to strike. And all the while, they were so defiantly honest, so defiantly _themselves_ that it was almost impossible not to trust them.

Dangerous.

On top of that, nothing inspires openness and honesty like a life-threatening disaster, and life-threatening disasters seemed to follow the Elrics around like loyal pets.

_You didn’t need to be so unfriendly!_ Allen hissed unhappily as they walked away from the wreckage of an inn in Youswell. _What did that prove? And if you had given me five minutes alone with that lieutenant, the inn would still be standing. Just a little while! I could have—_

He cut himself off, but it was far, far too late.

Al turned to face him, unreadable armor, while Ed shrugged the comment off, seemingly ignoring all of its implications. Seemingly. Allen cursed himself; he knew better. That slip of the tongue would come back to haunt him when he least expected it.

_Whatever_ , Ed said. _He likes me better than you. Or, well, he likes money and power. Which gave me an idea_ …

After a month and several hundred miles, the Elrics knew as much about Allen as Allen did about them. Way too much on the one hand. Not nearly enough on the other.

_It sucks_ , Ed said eventually, _that you have to do this on your own_.

Allen rubbed his left arm, hidden carefully under a sleeve and a glove, and felt only pressure. A nervous habit. _It doesn’t matter. There’s no one else who can do it. I promised my father that I’d keep moving forward, and I will._

_Yeah_ , Ed answered. _I get that. But don’t…look, just be careful, okay? There are some real bastards out there, but that doesn’t mean everybody who ever did anything bad is a bastard. You know?_

_There are some soldiers we really owe a lot to_ , Al added.

_Okay_ , Allen said with disgraceful thoughtlessness. _I promise not to go after yours if you promise not to go after mine_.

Ed snorted. _You got a deal, cuz, see, we don’t ever go after anybody. Unlike some freaky bastards we know. You pick a name yet?_

For his next job, he would need two names. _Allen Walker_ , he said softly. Not the name he was born with, but the name he was closest to. Why not? This was the last time.

_I like it_ , Al said.

_Well,_ Al _, you would_ , Ed laughed back. _So. Allen Walker. Hope you like the military better than we do, because I’m telling you it sucks._

_I’m sure I’ll like the military._

_Yeah, right_.

There was no doubt that he’d like the military. After all, he needed the military, and he could always learn to love what he needed. So far he’d managed to get a lot of money, and that was good, as far as it went. What he hadn’t managed to get was power.

He’d like some.

_Make it count_.


End file.
